Becoming Jane Eyre [5CD][LL489]

$29.95

A beautifully imagined tale of the Bronte sisters and the writing of Jane Eyre.

The year is 1846. In a cold parsonage on the gloomy Yorkshire moors, a family seems cursed with disaster. A mother and two children dead. A father sick, without fortune, and hardened by the loss of his two most beloved family members. A son destroyed by alcohol and opiates. And three strong, intelligent young women, reduced to poverty and spinsterhood, with nothing to save them from their fate.

Nothing, that is, except their remarkable literary talent. So unfolds the story of the Bronte sisters. At its center are Charlotte and the writing of Jane Eyre. Delicately unraveling the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her, Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre will appeal to fans of historical fiction and, of course, the millions of readers who adore Jane Eyre.

AUTHORSheila Kohler is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including Cracks, which is now a movie starring Eva Green. Her work has been included in the Best American Short Stories, and she has won two O'Henry Prizes, an Open Fiction Award, a Willa Cather Prize, and a Smart Family Foundation Prize.

NARRATORJen Taylor is a regional theatre actress living on the West Coast. She has recorded numerous audio books as well as commercials and video games.

REVIEWSAudioFile
"Jen Taylor offers a strong reading of Kohler's parallel autobiographies of Charlotte Bronte and her most famous creation, Jane Eyre. Listeners enter the Bronte world, following Charlotte and her sisters, Anne and Emily, as they walk through parlor and park, reading to one another from their respective novels and poetry, giving each other ideas and criticism, coping with their jealousies, broken love affairs, health issues, their brother Branwell's dissipation, and their father's recovery from near blindness. Taylor uses a lush, throaty voice for her narration while creating an impressive range of voices for the dialogue and characterizations. Even high-pitched children's voices become credible in her skilled performance. This is an intriguing fictionalized look at how much of a writer's life sometimes makes its way into her novels."